is common; one study of prisons in four states estimated that at least one in five inmates has been sexually assaulted. J essner eventually started to dig into hundreds of violent crimes linked to the Aryan Brotherhood. Working with an officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, To- bacco and Firearms named Mike Halu- alani-a half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian agent who was as brash as J essner was genteel-Jessner attempted to devise a strategy to break the gang's stranglehold. But the more he investigated the more it seemed that the gang defied any conventional notion of a prose- cution. Jessner told me that he kept asking himself; "How do you stop people who see a mur- der rap as a badge of honor? How do you stop people who have already been stopped by the law and sentenced to life imprisonment?" By the nineteen -nineties, authorities, hoping to create at least some deterrent, and to protect other inmates, had relo- cated nearly all the Aryan Brotherhood's top leaders, including the Baron, to what were then a new breed of prisons, called "supermaxes." These prisoners were held in single cells, locked down nearly the entire da without, as one gang mem- ber put it, "seeing fresh earth, plant life, or unfiltered sunlight"; they exercised alone in an indoor cage, were fed meals through a tray slot, and had little, if any, human contact. In the case of Silverstein, who was al- ready serving multiple life sentences when he killed the guard Clutts, in 1983, the Bureau of Prisons had established a separate unit for him at Leavenworth, where he was held in a Hannibal Lecter- style cage. Though Silverstein continued to sketch, he was for years not permitted to have a comb or a hairbrush, and when the reporter Pete Earley visited him, in the late eighties, he had long wild hair and a beard. "They want me to go crazy;" he told Earle "They want to point their fingers at me and sa 'See, see, we told you he is a lunatic.' . . . I didn't come in here a killer, but in here you learn hate. The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us. . . . I find myself smiling at the thought of me killing Clutts each time they deny me a phone call, a visit, or keep the lights on. I find it harder and harder to repent and ask for forgiveness, because deep inside I can feel that hatred and anger growing." Jessner told me, "Within the gang's lore, Silverstein has become its Christ fi " gure. Even under these conditions, which some civil-rights groups considered a vi- olation of human rights, the Aryan Brotherhood continued to flourish. Its members developed elaborate ways to communicate. They dropped notes through pipes that were connected to nearby cells; they tapped Morse code on prison bars; they forced or- derlies to pass kites; theywhis- pered through vents in "carnie," a convoluted, rhyming code language. ("Bottle stoppers" meant "coppers.") In addition, the leaders had developed a devoted co- terie of women on the outside who had fallen in love with them through visits and correspondence and could serve as couriers, relaying messages back and forth between members. One woman who coöperated in the gang's illegal busi- nesses later claimed she had Stockholm syndrome. With the help of prison authorities, Jessner began to intercept a series of covert messages. Portions of the letters appeared to be blank, as if someone had been interrupted. Mter analysts applied heat with an iron and placed the paper under ultraviolet light, letters would ap- pear, revealing "a secret message," as the EB.I. wrote in an internal report. Cryptographers analyzed the "ink" of one such note, and discovered that the message was written with urine. The message itself was baffling; it had been scrambled into a code. "They have cer- tain words that mean a certain thing," one former member said. "If they tell you that 'somebody's going to build a house in the country,' the prevalent word . . . is 'country;' because . . . that , d '" means mur ere Jessner and his team spent hours breaking sentences apart and recon- structing them. He started to see pat- terns in the messages: "baby boy" meant yes, and "baby girl" meant no. One day, prison authorities intercepted a note sent by T. D. Bingham, the A.B. com- missioner, to the Baron. It said, "Well I am a grandfather, at last my boy's wife 168 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 16 & 23, 2004 gave birth to a strapping eight pound seven ounce baby bo " Jessner feared that the reference to the baby's weight was code for 187, the California legal statute pertaining to murder; the fact that the baby was a boy suggested that a hit had been approved. Then analysts noticed that several of the letters had squiggly marks, almost like tails, on them. The words "eight pound," for in- stance, had curlicues on the letters "e," "",," d " d " I d b g, n, an . t appeare to e a code within a code. After scrutinizing the letters, au- thorities determined that the note was in fact written in a bili teral cipher, a method invented by Sir Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century philosopher. It involved using two distinct alphabets, de- pending on how the letters were drawn. An unadorned "c" referred to alphabet A, whereas a curlicued "c" represented alphabet B. Investigators went through the note, categorizing each letter by al- phabet until they had a cluster of letters that all seemed to be a play on the initials of the Aryan Brotherhood: bbbaaaaabbabaaabababbabaaaba- baaabaaabbbababbaabbaaabbaabbabb- baabb . . . It still made no sense. But after ana- lysts broke the letters into clusters of five, J essner says, they started to real- ize that each cluster represented an indi- vidual letter. Thus "ababb" was an ''A,'' "abbab" was a "B," and so on. They had finally cracked the code; now they went through the letter again. It said: Confirm message from Chris to move on DC. Officials knew that "DC" meant the D.C. Blacks, a prison gang against whom the Aryan Brotherhood had re- cently declared war. But, by the time au- thorities decoded the letter, two black inmates had been found dead In their cells in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: one was stabbed thirty-four times, the other thirty-five. The Brotherhood began developing murder schemes that could succeed even in maximrnn-security environments. They started to befriend their foes, so they could one day "rock them to sleep." At Pelican Ba where frIends cOtÙd apply to be cellmates, they sought to room with the very men they wanted to kill.